New era turns into a new mess for Major League Baseball

Oct. 5, 2012 - Trash litters the field after the Atlanta Braves braves fans protest a call during the eight inning of the 2012 National League wild card playoff game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Turner Field.

In 10 days, we’ve seen two of the worst blown calls imaginable. One sparked protests from football fans in Green Bay. The other turned a baseball field into a landfill, prompting Braves fans to litter in their own yard.

It’s getting ugly out there. And less than 24 hours before a new era turned into a new mess for Major League Baseball, Bob Brenly smelled trouble.

“Well, let me tell you something,” the former Diamondbacks manager/analyst said on XTRA-AM 910. “With the kind of umpiring I saw this summer, it could come down to a horrible call by an umpire that’s not reviewed and somebody gets eliminated from the playoffs because of it. And I think you’re going to see a lot of that this postseason.”

That’s prophetic. It’s also pathetic.

The link between these two events has nothing to do with officiating. The “Monday Night Football” debacle in Seattle was the handiwork of replacement refs who were not qualified to be on that field. The infield-fly rule was invoked by an additional umpire who wouldn’t have been there during the regular season, as Major League Baseball beefs up its crews for the playoffs.

The implications are also unclear. The Seahawks might not benefit from the unearned victory, and the Packers may ultimately recover the unfair loss. Had that left-field umpire made the right call Friday, the Braves still might have gagged, as their history suggests.

The commonality is us. We have become far less tolerant of officiating blunders. We live in an era of wondrous technology, where a software company named after a piece of fruit would now crush the NFL in a brand war.

We see immediate replays in high definition, from countless angles. We expect officials to see the same things in real time. If we’re not at the game, we view influential calls on a handheld device in a matter of seconds. If we’re inside the stadium, we’re susceptible to the mob mentality that arises from aggrieved fans. It raises the level of vitriol everywhere, even when we’re wrong.

A few hours after Brenly made his astounding prediction, our football Cardinals took the field in St. Louis, where a Rams defender flattened Kevin Kolb with a helmet-to-helmet hit. The illegal play drew an appropriate flag, and replays seemed to side with the officials.

Yet the home crowd was incensed. They booed the crew after every play. It went on for minutes. Maybe it wasn’t as lengthy as the 19-minute delay that soiled the playoff game in Atlanta, but it was long enough to reveal the change in our hearts.

These games have become too important, with unprecedented amounts of people financially and emotionally invested. And with the technology available, the kind that has merely changed the world, we are no longer civil or graceful when wronged by human error.

The NFL reacted quickly to the blown call in the Seattle-Green Bay game, bending to make a deal with locked-out officials. The league realized another bad call could have dramatic implications. If a home team was robbed by a replacement referee, it could cause civil unrest. The blood — proverbial or otherwise — would be on Roger Goodell’s hands.

The NBA is also addressing this issue. It will begin penalizing floppers, those who trick officials into making bad calls.

Now Bud Selig must do the same. He has two options:

He can institute full-blown instant replay to govern baseball. Or he can shorten the season to 154 games and make the wild-card playoffs a best-of-three series. The stakes are too high for anything less, and whatever he chooses, Selig must apologize to Braves fans for the inconvenience.

Just like the NFL did with replacement refs, Major League Baseball took a huge gamble with a one-game playoff format. They wanted to make more money. They wanted to recreate the winner-take-all excitement that captivated fans at the end of the 2011 season. The logic made perfect sense:

Wild-card winners don’t deserve special accommodations. If those teams had to burn their best pitcher to advance from a one-game playoff, that was a fair concession to the division winners.

They didn’t anticipate an umpire’s mistake on a non-reviewable judgment call becoming the focal point of their new era. They didn’t anticipate the winning team running off the field in fear of an angry mob, forgoing the traditional celebration.

Or they underestimated the trend that’s taking place in and around our stadiums, the one that looks dangerously close to hooliganism.

Reach Bickley at dan.bickley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8253. Follow him at twitter.com/danbickley. Listen to “Bickley and MJ” weekdays at 2-6 p.m. on XTRA Sports 910.

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